I want to return to this story about the University of Nebraska at Omaha’s decision to terminate its football program to fund in part its move from Division II to Division I, because I think it says something relevant about the current economics of college athletic programs.

Trev Alberts is UNO’s athletic director and it’s clear from the article that he’s fully invested in the decision. As a former college football player and former Mark May sidekick, he’s not a college football hater. So why the call? While it was one Alberts felt strongly he had to make, it wasn’t easy. And it won’t be cheap for a school UNO’s size.

… Previously a school making such a step up paid a fee of only $20,000, Alberts said. But four years ago, concern that schools not capable of competing at Division I were making rash decisions to move up led the NCAA to put a moratorium on such reclassifications. During the interim, the NCAA put new standards in place to make it tougher to initiate such changes.

One was to require any school stepping up to have a bona fide offer of membership from an existing Division I conference. That’s why UNO’s invitation to join the Summit League was so critical, Alberts said.

As an additional hurdle, the NCAA created the $1.4 million fee. It’s based on the average annual share of championship revenue the NCAA divvies out to Division I members, though schools in lower-level conferences such as the Summit generally receive far less than that — in the hundreds of thousands annually.

“There’s a concerted effort to stop institutions from reclassifying,” Alberts said. “The NCAA hopes to eliminate those who would ultimately dilute the overall brand and (the NCAA’s) ability to distribute (dollars) to its members.”

Those “rash decisions” have come on the basketball side. The last time I looked, there are now more than 300 schools which are eligible to play in March Madness. That’s an awful lot of slices to cut if you’re the NCAA, even with a pie as large as the one the basketball tourney bakes. And a $20,000 entry fee isn’t exactly a daunting barrier to entry when you’re chasing even the relatively smaller payouts the Summit League receives. That’s why it became time to price the riff-raff out. And that’s why Alberts believed he had no choice but to take the drastic step of shutting down football. Because for schools like UNO, the money isn’t there; it’s in basketball.

All of which should make you wonder what would happen if D-1 football’s postseason were handed over to the NCAA for it to manage. Actually, I don’t think it would take very much imagination at all to see a number of 1-AA schools begin the gold rush to move up and gain access to the money which a football playoff would generate. And the inevitable expansion of both D-1 and the football playoffs to accommodate that. And the increased fee the NCAA would be able to charge schools looking to make the move. And the willingness of those schools to pay the fee in the hopes of gaining access to the huge pot of postseason money.

All of that would be good for the smaller schools looking to move up in class and the NCAA, but it’s hard to imagine how any of that benefits the schools in the power conferences who would face the double risks of watching the postseason money carved into many more shares than now and the potential dilution of the regular season TV broadcast rights as more and more attention would be diverted to the postseason playoffs.

How much imagination do you think Larry Scott, Mike Slive and Jim Delany have?

But wouldn’t that have been GREAT? Seriously, May and almost anyone else is going to want to come to blows, and the only thing that has kept it from happening with Granny Clampett is he knows he’d get killed. Spit isn’t much of a defense.

NCAA was too late implementing these rules. 300+ D-1 programs is ridiculous. Each level should have multiple criteria for both maintaining D-1 status and becoming a D-1 member. (i.e. stadium/arena seating)

Again, just more reason why the major football conferences will be thinking very seriously about dropping out of the NCAA all together. They don’t need the NCAA. Not to mention the fact that the NCAA has pretty much made itself a laughingstock the last couple of years.

The NCAA “family” is dysfunctional because the membership is too diverse and the needs vary greatly. Without strong leadership, and the enormity of dollars involved, things will just become more fractured. A coalition of members representing the “haves” needs to quietly develop a succession plan, and propose a structure for the future. The 50-60 top football programs have so little in common with the bottom 60, both financially or talent wise. This would solve the scheduling, bowl, and playoff controversies in one package. It really is just another evolutionary step, similar to when Yale, Harvard, and Army went their own way.

Trev, whose undisclosed source for this brilliant idea may have been a caller on TrevMailBag where he was Newman and still counts Jim and Lloyd as personal references, delivers the first step-up economic stimulus to the NCAA.

Trev hopes this qualifies him as something better than a longshot candidate for the position as President of the NCAA when Emmert elects to spend more time with his family, which some expect to occur shortly after his response letter to DOJ. More likely though it will establishTrev ‘s bona fides as an applicant for a position as an athletic director at other redistibution outlets like a Tennessee or a Notre Dame.

Just looking at the article, Andrew Schwarz’s analysis is quite bad. First, as I pointed out this earlier, he is not an economist, he has a PhD in Business Admin at UCLA in marketing and he is most certainly not active in economic literature. And he works for a law firm that deals with these types of issues. Schwarz is trying to create an atmosphere friendly to litigation, not reality. 2nd, he claims that the UNO football program runs in the black because Alberts ignores student fees. But I would dare say that UNO, like all state schools, probably cannot rely on this funding into perpetuity. Its artificial, not generated by the program, its something that students have to pay. Its these type of fees that are being targeted, for this Schwarz guy to criticize Alberts for not relying on these fees to justify keeping football and wrestling is absurd.

That Rome/Everette show looked staged to me. If that’s all Everette has, pushing him out of his chair, then calling him Chris was not that off the mark. Rome deserved to be punched in the face. And many times over.

Quote Of The Day

“Being a student at Georgia and playing ball, I’ve definitely grown, widened my horizons and experienced things I never thought I would. I feel like I’ve grown on and off the field, and the university prepared me for that. I’ve done some awesome things and met some awesome people. I’ll definitely be back to finish my schoolwork, because that was a big priority for me and my family and weighed heavily on my decision. I know football won’t last forever. It’ll be great to come back and get that degree, so I can tell my kids about it one day.” — Roquan Smith, AJ-C, 3/7/18